enhurst, and
went for a walk instead in the fresh summer meadows. Robert Monteith,
for his part, had gone to the Derby--so they call that orgy--and Philip
had meant to accompany him in the dogcart, but remained behind at the
last moment to take care of Frida; for Frida, being a lady at heart,
always shrank from the pollution of vulgar assemblies. As they
walked together across the lush green fields, thick with campion and
yellow-rattle, they came to a dense copse with a rustic gate, above
which a threatening notice-board frowned them straight in the face,
bearing the usual selfish and anti-social inscription, "Trespassers will
be prosecuted."

"Let's go in here and pick orchids," Bertram suggested, leaning over
the gate. "Just see how pretty they are! The scented white butterfly! It
loves moist bogland. Now, Mrs. Monteith, wouldn't a few long sprays of
that lovely thing look charming on your dinner-table?"

"But it's preserved," Philip interposed with an awestruck face.
"You can't go in there: it's Sir Lionel Longden's, and he's awfully
particular."

"Can't go in there? Oh, nonsense," Bertram answered, with a merry laugh,
vaulting the gate like a practised athlete. "Mrs. Monteith can get over
easily enough, I'm sure. She's as light as a fawn. May I help you over?"
And he held one hand out.

"But it's private," Philip went on, in a somewhat horrified voice; "and
the pheasants are sitting."

"Private? How can it be? There's nothing sown here. It's all wild wood;
we can't do any damage. If it was growing crops, of course, one would
walk through it not at all, or at least very carefully. But this is
pure woodland. Are the pheasants tabooed, then? or why mayn't we go near
them?"

"They're not tabooed, but they're preserved," Philip answered somewhat
testily, making a delicate distinction without a difference, after the
fashion dear to the official intellect. "This land belongs to Sir Lionel
Longden, I tell you, and he chooses to lay it all down in pheasants.
He bought it and paid for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he
likes with it."

"That's the funniest thing of all about these taboos," Bertram mused, as
if half to himself. "The very people whom they injure and inconvenience
the most, the people whom they hamper and cramp and debar, don't seem to
object to them, but believe in them and are afraid of them. In Samoa, I
remember, certain fruits and fish and animals and so forth were tabooed
to the chiefs,